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Download Download S K E N È Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies 5:2 2019 SKENÈ Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies Founded by Guido Avezzù, Silvia Bigliazzi, and Alessandro Serpieri Executive Editor Guido Avezzù. General Editors Guido Avezzù, Silvia Bigliazzi. Editorial Board Simona Brunetti, Francesco Lupi, Nicola Pasqualicchio, Susan Payne, Gherardo Ugolini. Managing Editor Francesco Lupi. Assistant Managing Editors Valentina Adami, Emanuel Stelzer, Roberta Zanoni. Books Reviews Editors Chiara Battisti, Sidia Fiorato Staff Francesco Dall’Olio, Bianca Del Villano, Marco Duranti, Carina Louise Fernandes, Maria Serena Marchesi, Antonietta Provenza, Savina Stevanato. Advisory Board Anna Maria Belardinelli, Anton Bierl, Enoch Brater, Jean-Christophe Cavallin, Richard Allen Cave, Rosy Colombo, Claudia Corti, Marco De Marinis, Tobias Döring, Pavel Drábek, Paul Edmondson, Keir Douglas Elam, Ewan Fernie, Patrick Finglass, Enrico Giaccherini, Mark Griffith, Daniela Guardamagna, Stephen Halliwell, Robert Henke, Pierre Judet de la Combe, Eric Nicholson, Guido Paduano, Franco Perrelli, Didier Plassard, Donna Shalev, Susanne Wofford. Copyright © 2019 SKENÈ Published in December 2019 All rights reserved. ISSN 2421-4353 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission from the publisher. SKENÈ Theatre and Drama Studies http://skenejournal.skeneproject.it [email protected] Dir. Resp. (aut. Trib. di Verona): Guido Avezzù P.O. Box 149 c/o Mail Boxes Etc. (MBE150) – Viale Col. Galliano, 51, 37138, Verona (I) Contents Manuela Giordano – Athenian Power: Seven Against Thebes 5 and the Democracy-in-Arms Vasiliki Kousoulini – Restraining the Song of her Mistress 19 and Saving the Oikos? Nurses in Euripides’ Medea, Hippolytus and Andromache Francesco Dall’Olio – A Liar Tells the Truth: 43 the Dramatic Function of the Vice in Cambises Elena Pellone – King Lear: Everything Comes of Nothing 65 and the Great Stage of Fools Robert William Haynes – Replacing the Romantic Plantation: 81 Horton Foote’s Dramatic Engagement from Gone with the Wind (The Musical)to Convicts Martina Treu – Erase and Rewrite. Ancient Texts, 101 Modern Palimpsests Special Section Camilla Caporicci – Emanuel Stelzer, Portraits in Early Modern 127 English Drama: Visual Culture, Play-Texts, and Performances, Abingdon and New York: Routledge Maria Elisa Montironi – Roberta Mullini, Parlare per non farsi 133 sentire. L’a parte nei drammi di Shakespeare, Roma: Bulzoni Gioia Angeletti – Tradition and Revolution in Scottish Drama 139 and Theatre: An Open Debate? Alessandro Clericuzio – Dirk Gindt, Tennessee Williams in Sweden 149 and France, 1945-1965. Cultural Translations, Sexual Anxieties and Racial Fantasies, London and New York: Methuen Gherardo Ugolini – Women Against War. The Trojan Women, 155 Helen, and Lysistrata at Syracuse Francesco Dall’Olio* A Liar Tells the Truth: the Dramatic Function of the Vice in Cambises Abstract The nature of the Vice’s function in Thomas Preston’s Cambises (1560-1561) is one of the most mysterious and fascinating aspects of this early Elizabethan tragedy. In presenting a new take on the subject, this paper considers some aspects of the figure neglected in previous studies, which set this character apart from others of the same kind. These include the limits imposed by Preston to his role, resulting in the Vice being ‘substituted’ by the tyrant as the source of evil in the play, and the odd sincerity of the critique to Cambises’ rule he expresses in his soliloquies, which is in tune with both literary tradition and the opinion of other positive characters. On these grounds, the paper offers an interpretation of the Vice’s role as a character used by Preston to openly convey the message at the core of the play, the condemnation of the legitimate king turned tyrant: a message that, by the time the tragedy was being written, was a dangerous one to openly utter. Keywords: vice; Cambises; tyranny; resistance Introduction Between the last decade of the twentieth century and the first one of the twenty-first, Thomas Preston’s tragedyCambises (printed 1569, but writ- ten around 1560-1) enjoyed a new popularity among scholars of early Eliza- bethan drama. Starting with Eugene D. Hill’s paper (1992), the tragedy has been recognised as a complex piece of theatre, the work of a high-profile intellectual dealing with important political topics and echoing the feelings of the English intellectual Protestant elite after the end of the Marian perse- cution. In the light of this new reputation, the work has been the subject of many studies, which have expanded the view of the tragedy as a politically engaged drama exploring the theme of tyranny and the issues connected to it in a multifaceted and thoughtful way.1 1 To mention the most recent examples Ward 2008, Sen 2011, Mathur 2014, Dall’Olio 2017: 491-2. * University of Verona – [email protected] © SKENÈ Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies 5:2 (2019), 43-63 http://skenejournal.skeneproject.it 44 FrancescoMarco Dall’Olio Duranti One aspect of the tragedy to attract a great deal of attention has been Ambidexter the Vice. This is hardly a surprise, since not only is he the character with most lines in the drama,2 but he is also “thematically as well as structurally . central to the play” (Hill 1992: 408). He is the absolute protagonist of the comic scenes where he interacts with low-life charac- ters, but he is also able to move in the king’s court, thus tying together the two sides of the dramatic action. He plays an important part at some points in the tragedy: it is because of him that Sisamnes the judge and Smirdis, the king’s brother, fall victims to the tyrant. He also constantly steps out of the fictional world of the play to speak with the audience, commenting on what happened and boasting about his own ability at being duplicitous (or, as he calls it, ‘playing with both hands’). All these data strengthen the im- pression that Preston “structured his play on a running parallel between Cambises and Ambidexter” (Hill 1992: 427), a fact which did not fail to in- trigue scholars, especially for what could mean for the political message underlying the tragedy.3 My object in this essay is that of offering a new interpretation of the Vice’s political function in Cambises, by focusing on some aspects of the role which have either gone unnoticed in previous studies, or whose im- portance to the understanding of the tragedy has been downplayed. In par- ticular, in the first part of the paper, where I review what the Vice does in the play, I will show how Thomas Preston adopted a series of solutions whose result is to heavily undermine the role of Ambidexter as the ‘offi- cial’ incarnation of evil in the tragedy. This, in time, invites us to read in a new light the open critique to the tyrant’s behaviour Ambidexter express- es in his soliloquies, a critique which, as I will highlight in the second part, is expressed in such a way as to faithfully echo the literary tradition about Cambises, and is also shared by other, positive, characters inside the play: two factors which end up turning the character into a reliable voice of op- position to the tyrant. Then, in the final part of the paper, I will consider these results in relation to the political and cultural context of the play, in order to understand what moved Preston to use the Vice in such an unor- thodox way. 2 The Vice has 271 lines on a total of 1190 (Prologue and Epilogue excluded), and he is the only character in the play besides Cambises (who has 255 lines) to constantly ap- pear from beginning to end. 3 After Hill, the most careful analysis of Ambidexter’s political role has been offered by Mathur 2014, which sees the Vice’s role in connection with the political theme of popular resistance to tyranny. AIphigenia Liar Tells Taurica the Truth: and thethe DramaticNarrative FunctionArtificiality of the of ViceEuripides’ in Cambises Prologues 45 1. What the Vice Does (or Does Not) As the traditional incarnation of evil, it is the Vice’s role to convince either the protagonist or the antagonist of the play he is in to abandon the path of virtue in order to lead them and/or someone else to their downfall and re- joice in it. This was a traditional plot element of the genre of the interludes between the 1550s and the 1560s, from which Cambises reprises the char- acter. The usual patterns saw the Vice either talking characters into fol- lowing their own sinful desires or deceiving them into making an hon- est mistake with disastrous consequences. A clear example of the first pat- tern can be found in R.B.’s Apius and Virginia (printed 1575, but probably written before 1567; cf. Happé 1972: 273), where Haphazard the Vice per - suades Judge Apius to give way to his lust for Virginia; for the second one, a good example can be seen either in Nicholas Udall’s Respublica (1553), where Avarice the Vice, posing as Policie, deceives the titular character into entrusting him with the rule of the kingdom, or in John Pikeryng’s Horestes (1567), where the titular character is convinced by Revenge in- to thinking that his action is approved by the gods, and therefore feels al- lowed to go on with killing his mother.4 Both these dramatic formulae are present in Cambises. In his first solil- oquy, at the beginning of Scene 2, Ambidexter states his intention to “give . a leape to Sisamnes the judge” (2.155),5 the dignitary Cambises left as re- gent while he was leading a military expedition to Egypt. In the next Scene, Ambidexter persuades Sisamnes to abuse the power entrusted to him for his gain.
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